Just when you thought that everything Frida had been Frida-ed—a hundred books, a million fashion moments, a jillion selfie homages, and a veritable continent of accumulated Frida tchotchkes, from mugs to oven mitts to compression socks to Christmas tree ornaments in the form of a gold-trimmed frame with an image of a dog dressed up as Frida, not to mention a movie or two¹—this spring High Art Frida returned. There was an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City of works from the Gelman Collection, among them a large number by Frida and Diego Rivera.² There was an exhibition of the work of Frida and her followers that started at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and is currently at Tate Modern, and El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego at the Metropolitan Opera, together with a small installation at the Museum of Modern Art of works related to it. To counter the socks and dog-faced Fridas, the culture seems to have felt the need to reestablish a connection with the flesh-and-blood artist, the profoundly original woman who used her own face as both a mask and a revelation of a soul stripped bare, who wore ethnic dress as a conjuration, and who spent her life painting not just her portrait but her Sinnbild, a term that the German Mexican art historian Paul Westheim used to signify “the image of the meaning.”³

To begin at the beginning: Frida Kahlo Calderón’s father was German. He came to Mexico when he was nineteen to seek his fortune, married a Mexican woman, translated his name from Wilhelm to Guillermo, eventually took Mexican citizenship but spoke Spanish always with a German accent, and became an architectural photographer who also made many self-portraits in which he stared fixedly at the camera. As a girl, Frida (she spelled her name “Frieda” but dropped the e in her twenties) was a laughing, lighthearted spirit who was popular in school. Years later, though, she would mention how her schoolmates had mocked her skinny right leg and slight limp, the result of a double misfortune: spina bifida—a deformation of her spinal column—and then what was most likely polio at the age of seven. In the intensely nationalist Mexico of the 1920s, swept up in postrevolutionary fervor, it is reasonable to assume that her schoolmates also made fun of her good-natured foreign father and did not consider her quite Mexican.

Whatever the case, she grew up defiantly original, seductive in dress and manner, and fiercely nationalistic. An essay by James Oles in the catalog for the Houston/Tate show takes us through the evolution of her wardrobe: she painted herself for the first time as a beautiful sophisticate in a velvet dress, posed for her father in a Chinese-style gown, and wore a three-piece man’s suit for a family photograph when she was eighteen. And long before she married the world-famous muralist Diego Rivera and began experimenting with native dress, she found another way to declare her Mexicanness: she swore like a sailor. Even her correspondence is littered with self-conscious cabrones, chingaderas, and pendejos. A strange effect, this tiny, well-brought-up girl puffing on a cigarette and reaching for a seaman’s vocabulary. Oh, and she decided she was partially Jewish, although the evidence indicates that her paternal ancestors were of stolid Lutheran stock. While she was at it, she determined that it would be better if she were born not in 1907—her real birth year—but in 1910, the year of the start of the great Mexican Revolution. Self-made Frieda! She would continue to invent herself, or her self, with each portrait to the end.

Largely self-taught, in her late teens she was already making small self-portraits that she considered inconsequential, impelled to do so after a streetcar collided with a bus in which she and a boyfriend were riding and drove a handrail through her pelvis and out her vagina. She spent three months lying face-up and in traction, and no doubt the training in staying still helped her get through a lifelong cycle of surgical torment, months of immobility, and painful recovery.

According to legend, Diego was standing on scaffolding at work on his great muralistic portrait of Mexico at the Ministry of Education when someone commanded him to descend. A young person at the foot of the ladder thrust a few of her canvases at him. “Listen,” she said. “I need you to tell me if these are any good or not.” Years before, at age fourteen, she had already decided that she would marry the famous old fat man she had spied painting a mural on the wall of her high school. He was married at the time to the stupendously beautiful Guadalupe Marín, but they had separated by the time Frida accosted him. Disarmed and seduced by the audacious Frida, he began his elaborate formal courtship soon after she introduced herself—complete with weekend visits to her aged parents. They married in 1929, when she was twenty-two and he was forty-two, and her painting of the couple on their wedding day is a study in charm, tiny Frida and enormous Diego side by side, solemn and holding hands. The style was consciously naive, but she was always a sophisticated artist, with a library of visual references in her head: the Houston catalog points out the painting’s kinship with Jan van Eyck’s portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, of which Frida kept a reproduction. For the first time in a painting she is wearing not elegant velvets and silks but a Mexican rebozo.

What to make of her ethnic clothing, so essential to her worldwide appeal today? It was only after Frida and Diego returned from a long sojourn in the United States, more convinced than ever of their Communist faith and militant anti-imperialism, that she began to wear native dress. And among the countless beautiful garments with which the indigenous women of Mexico once adorned themselves she gave pride of place to those of the women of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the tehuanas, and especiallytheirglorious ceremonial costume: a long skirt with a petticoat-like flounce at the bottom, a waist-length huipil densely embroidered with flowers, and, surrounding the face, the starched, pleated resplandor, white as the moon. In many if not most of her photographs, and also in the self-portraits, Frida is wearing the tehuanas’ simple everyday outfit: a long skirt with a bottom flounce and a short, square blouse with machine-sewn geometrical embroidery. She added a plain dark gray central Mexico rebozo with a simple fringe, which became so essential to her she even wore it in her hospital bed. Frida laid claim to roots in Oaxaca through her mother, who was born in the state, but in photographs recently found in the Casa Azul,⁴ Señora Matilde Calderón wears the staid, high-necked, long-sleeved dress of nineteenth-century urban women.

Naturally Diego, with his deep love of the Indian and pre-Hispanic worlds, encouraged the outfits, and of course they are a comfortable and graceful style of dress, and beautiful beyond compare. It was not particularly original of Frida to wear indigenous garb: society ladies and bohemian women alike loved to pose for studio photographs in tehuana costume, and even before the revolution the Frenchified upper classes sent their children off to the school play dressed like inditos, as Mexican parents do still. Also, the long skirts covered her gimpy leg. The question is, though, why did Frida choose to portray herself repeatedly in this costume? No doubt she was concerned with the desperate situation of the indigenous throughout Mexico, but they are not present in her work as they are constantly in Diego’s murals, not even in the forty or so of her paintings that are not self-portraits. Rather, Frida might be saying as she stares directly at the viewer, I am Frida Kahlo and I am wearing this costume because that is what I wear. But perhaps she enrobed herself in Mexicanness to counter an old fear of not being Mexican enough.

One wonders, though, about the maids in the Blue House, where Frida was born and died. Often lonely, she must have spent a great deal of time with the women who shared her home. There was once a nanny who nursed her and whom she painted wearing a pre-Hispanic stone mask, and there must have been a cook and at least one maid at the Blue House during her married life, more likely two (possibly portrayed in Two Women, 1928), given her increasing infirmity. They could well have come from one of the impoverished states that regularly supplied young indigenous women to work in Mexican households, but once women in the traditional communities found work away from home they no longer had the time or the materials to weave and embroider their own wardrobe. Did these invisible women wear the plain, much-laundered dresses of the urban poor? Did they come from Oaxaca? Were they an influence? It’s not difficult to imagine them chattering and giggling with Frida in the kitchen, telling her stories about the rituals and recipes and eccentric characters of their village back home, exclaiming and clapping with perhaps just a little envy as she showed off a new huipil from Yalalag or Pinotepa or a necklace of enormous jadeite beads, the latest gift from Diego.

He gave her everything: his sincere and lifelong love, his equally lifelong faith in communism, his admiration for and encouragement of her art, delight in her outfits, deep knowledge of his country’s pre-Conquest culture, a thrilling circle of famous friends and admirers, and the promiscuity and emotional absence that caused her years of anguish. Her own promiscuity is well known. (For Frida “sex was a form of enjoying life, a kind of vital impulse,” her first boyfriend observed to her indispensable biographer Hayden Herrera.) We don’t know if Diego suffered the same torments of abandonment that she did, though, because he painted campesinos, not torn-out hearts.

She loved him to distraction. Over a period of ten years she filled a book-size, Morocco leather–bound notebook now known as her “diary,” although it is anything but that.⁵ It is instead a private door into herself that she visited now and then to paint astonishing impromptu watercolors, fill entire pages with Surrealist automatic writing, and write poems and erotic letters to Diego:

Nothing compares to your hands nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days, you are the mirror of the night, the violent flash of lightning, the dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter, my fingertips touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.

This entry appears to be from the early 1940s, after the couple’s divorce and reconciliation, but the dynamics of the marriage never changed. In later pages she painted three desperate words in large scarlet brushstrokes:

DIEGO

Estoy sola.

(I am alone.)

By then, by her account, she had had fourteen recent surgeries (in addition to another thirty or so after the streetcar accident), spent years in a wheelchair and a plaster corset or flat on her back in her four-poster bed, sometimes in traction, painting with the aid of an overhead mirror and easel. Referring to herself as “the patient” in a long, detailed medical history in her diary, she notes that at the time of the divorce she is consuming almost a bottle of cognac nearly every day. She has also acquired a sturdy addiction to Demerol, which failed to stop the pain. Toward the closing pages of the notebook she paints and writes of her terror of the forthcoming amputation of her right leg from the knee down. It seems she has developed gangrene. After the operation there are more pages filled with devout thanks to the doctors who had at various times—Oh, Frida!—sawed unsuccessfully through her body, and thanks also to the nurses and attendants, and everyone who cheered her on and helped her survive her broken self.

But in truth it was she alone who got herself through her life with the help of an easel and a paintbrush: 102 paintings in all, of which more than fifty are the self-portraits that revealed her inner life and allowed her to withstand its outer odyssey. Among those in the Houston/Tate show is a 1935 painting of a woman lying dead in her bed, knife wounds all over her naked body. She called it Just a Few Little Pinches. In another, from 1946, she is sitting in tehuana costume and holding one of the many tormenting back braces she was required to wear in the last years of her life. Behind her a second Frida lies on a hospital gurney, her uncovered back turned toward us in order to reveal the bright red scars of the surgery from which she’s just emerged. Viva la Vida (1954) is her last completed painting, a vibrant watermelon still life. Within weeks she was dead, but not before she had attended one more protest march in a wheelchair and been taken in an ambulance to the vernissage of her first solo exhibition in Mexico. Her four-poster bed had been transported to the gallery for the occasion. Friends and strangers filed around, said hello, and presented their congratulations, and she relished every minute. Not everyone has the chance to be present at their own hugely successful wake.

Over a period of twenty-two years she was to portray herself and pose for endless photographs, mostly in tehuana outfits, almost always facing the viewer directly and with an unflinching stare, somewhat like Marina Abramović’s in her later experiment with encounter, or the three minutes one is supposed to spend looking into another person’s eyes in order to fall in love with them—a stare that seems to ask the viewer over and over not “Who are you?” but “Tell me: Who are you is me am I?”

That stare, which enfolds the viewer, the implied suffering, the beautiful vestments worn for the ceremony of painting, the flower-crowned face, composed an icon from the very beginning. It just took a few decades for it to become world-famous and appear on the Internet junk market. It’s shocking but not surprising to find in the deepest recesses of Etsy a bright pink plastic statuette titled, with no irony, Holy Virgin Frida, or to hear about some chef who has prepared a salad, or a cocktail, or something, in purported homage to Frida and called it Hot and Horny. Her most beautiful (and by far largest) painting, The Two Fridas (1939), shows not-really-Indian Frida holding hands with not-really-foreigner Frida, steadfast against a turbulent sky and accompanied by all the symbols of their pain. But there were many more than two Fridas, enough for everyone: joking, laughing, riotous Frida; party Frida; Frida-and-Diego Frida; glamorous Frida; Frida-having-sex-with-every-Tom-Dick-and-Jane-and-Leon-Trotsky-too Frida; bleeding Frida; rebel Frida; Frida weeping tears, tears, tears.

Sorrowing Frida.

It’s too bad that the earnest effort to show us Frida and her mentors and influences, and then her influencees, in the otherwise gorgeous Houston/Tate exhibition and its accompanying catalog did not provide more exciting examples of art made by her iconographers. There are too many works that simply show the Frida icon against different backgrounds or that show the artist with Frida attributes in non-Frida surroundings. Among the striking exceptions is one by Julio Galán, a Monterrey painter who also died too young and whose work was also hungrily self-referential. On view as well are several intriguing works by Nahum B. Zenil, an artist who has stayed away from the fashionable Mexico City art scene and who periodically goes through fits of Fridaism, painting himself as her, or her with him, in mysterious and darkly funny ways. In general, though, one would wish for more art as exquisitely crafted, courageous, and image-breaking as hers, but unfortunately there aren’t really other Fridas; she was singularly herself.

She was abundantly present in human form on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera this spring, represented by the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, with the baritone Carlos Álvarez as Diego Rivera, in a new production of El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego. She was already evoked dozens of times in the lobby, as buzzy audience members showed up in their best approximation of her. She was painted on a man’s jacket and a couple of women’s skirts and jackets, while simpler homages came in the form of long dresses in bright colors and flowers, fake and real, worn like a halo.

The opera, which premiered in San Diego in 2022, was a hit in New York, and it was a relief to see the Met’s enormous stage filled with almost entirely Latino or Latin American performers singing about a Latin American heroine for an audience that almost certainly was the most Latin it’s ever been. And then there was the extraordinary first act set: a floor that cracked open to reveal the red light of boiling lava; a tree with a root system as gnarled as its branches, floating just off the ground or raised high. (This was reproduced in the installation at MoMA, which also included a small, exquisite selection of works by Frida and Diego.) There was a group of excellent dancers who were a little too much with us throughout, and music that was alive and many-colored. The difficulty lay with the libretto, in which Frida, who is dead, misses Diego, and Diego, who is alive, misses Frida. A mysterious character called Catrina, wonderfully sung by Gabriella Reyes, gives Frida permission to travel to the upper world of the living and fetch her husband, which she does. So much for plot.

All the many and great tragedies in Frida’s life—the streetcar accident, the spinal fusions, Diego’s emotional abandonment, her missing leg, her harrowing final years and death—have already happened by the time the opera begins, so there is no tragedy and resolution to move the story forward. As a result, the music has nowhere to go and ends up flat and repetitive. But no matter; there was nothing in the opera or the staging that was false, or pretentious, or thoughtless, and no doubt audiences will be happy to see it again and again.

It’s probably impossible at any rate to make a work about Frida that is as large as her. Carlos Fuentes used to tell a story about her entrance to the Teatro de Bellas Artes midway through the overture of Parsifal: “A noise invaded the theater that silenced the orchestra.” (It’s no use fact-checking a novelist in the full grip of anecdote.)

We all looked up to the balconies and saw the regal entrance of Frida Kahlo, with all these jewels on, the necklaces and the rings and the bracelets…. It all jangled like a cathedral gone mad, with all the bells jangling at the same time, made to distract from the weakness of her body, the fact that it was a crippled body, a dying body, and she gave [it] life through the jewels and the dresses, and the whole…

Fuentes, wide-eyed, let the sentence trail off as the epiphany came to him: “She was her own opera!”

Riotous, willful, vivid Frida, endlessly alive. Frida and her living death, so Mexican after all.